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Economics has always fascinated me enough to dabble in it. During my MBA one of my finance professors claimed that the GDP and DOW were correlated to the point that you could trade on it. Not a component of GDP, but the final GDP number itself. As things progressed in the class there was an additional claim that government spending was a good thing and that if you wanted to increase the DOW you should just increase government spending.

So, I decided to do the multiple regression analysis myself. And the things I found were surprising even to myself. I'm going to share some of that later once I finish the post. And that brings me to this article. Instead of just posting an article with a screenshot of an Excel graph I decided to turn it all into an interactive Javascript based project.

After poking into D3 a bit I decided to go with Rickshaw which is a layer above D3 that provides a lot of extra tools I need. Since D3 and Rickshaw require significant additional Javascript and CSS beyond what I'm using for Middleman's standard article I decided to break out of the blog metaphor and create a new page and layout. After that I had to get the data. The idea is to look at GDP component data, not just the final number. So I'm picking up the component data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the DOW data is coming from Econstats.com. I clean them up and convert them to JSON as a Middleman task. The idea is to detect updated data and automatically update the data, regressions, and graphs.

Here's the result so far. Its just a basic Rickshaw demo but its loading the right stuff and loading my JSON file with the data. Next weekend I'll hookup each data series and adding in the recalculations. My eventual goal is using R to automatically recalculate the regression whenever new data comes out.

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Today's article is a little late because I spent the evening at a local Atlanta event honoring Neal Boortz.
 

This is Jamie Dupree, Clark Howard, Sean Hannity, Eric Erickson, Hermain Caine, Neal Boortz, and Jeff Foxworthy
 
Boortz is a radio talk show host based here in Atlanta and syndicated throughout the country. Some call him conservative but he has always been a pragmatic libertarian. I've been listening to Neal since I moved to Atlanta in 1987. His last show is next week. While Neal has been doing this about as long as I've been alive, he has said on many occasions that he could continue. Instead he is “going galt”. Instead of an enclosed canyon in the Colorado mountains he is going on the road. He has moved to Florida to escape state income taxes and is keeping his income as low as possible.

Others in the country are doing similar things. Boortz says his doctor of many years shut his practice down the day after the election. Some are setting up armed compounds, there's a run on guns and ammmo, and state legislatures are considering nullifying federal law.

People who are pushed into a corner start to work to find ways to either escape or protect themselves from being pushed any further. I desperately hope we can find a way to live together without trying to push each other into corners.

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Back in December SpaceX flew the Grasshopper) VTVL demonstrator to 40 meters. Today they released a new video showing more details about the landing system:

There is a long history of VTVL vehicles having problems with landing legs. The entire flight can go fine but the last few seconds are extremely important. What isn't known is whether the system shown in the video has any relation to the final operational design. Its an interesting design but looks awfully heavy. While I was at Masten we iterated on several designs that optimized for aerodynamics and stowability, shock absorption, and simplicity. From what I've seen from Masten those iterations continue.

I haven't actually built a model but others have. Regardless of short term affects, reusability is the only way you can reduce launch costs that doesn't require new physics. What SpaceX is doing with Grasshopper shows that Elon is serious about reusability and the capabilities that cost reduction brings. Ad astra lucustae?

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One of my backburner projects involves exposing some of the more mythical bits of convention wisdom around why and how we explore. This is mostly to help inform future space exploration policy but also just out of personal curiosity. Big questions like “Exactly how did western civilization go from being stuck in Europe to exploring a new continent within 50 years?” or “What were the incentives that drove people to do things few thought possible?” The general idea is to take each major voyage of discovery from Henry the Navigators early voyages in 1430 to the final discoveries in the Pacific in the late 1700s.

The myth that started all of this is that Columbus' voyage was sponsored by the Kind and Queen of Spain, Ferdinand and Isabella. Even Wikipedia lets this myth continue by suggesting that Luis de Santángel used state funds, not his own. The facts are that Spain had just spent its last nickel kicking the Moors out of Spain. The mission was actually financed by Luis de Santangel (50%), two Genovese families (35%), and Columbus himself (15%) using personal loans he was able to scrounge up. What Isabella provided was a patent on the route, a guarantee of 10% of the revenue from any lands discovered for 10 years, and a title of nobility over the sea. The ships were also privately built and simply leased for the trips. The crew was also private. The legend that Isabella pawned the crown jewels to pay for the voyage isn't true either since they were already in hock. There is no evidence that any of the money came from the Spanish government. It is possible that some of the money used by Santangel came from the Catholic Church but the records simply don't exist.

The myth continues because much of the documenation was destroyed in a fire in Spain and because there was considerable propaganda between Spain and the city states of Italy over who could claim credit. This general trend of private financing, ships, and crews with government provided incentives such as patents and loan guarantees. The best source I found for Columbus is Paolo Emilio Taviani's Christopher Columbus: The Grand Design.

One notable exception is Henry the Navigator. He did finance and run some of the work to make Mediterranean caravels capable of deeper water and did finance the eventually successful attempt at rounding the Cape Bojador in 1434.

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The hot topic for the past week around the Atlanta business scene is who is moving to Buckhead and who isn't. David's daily post from today reports on the customer response for the first 72 hours of Atlanta Technology Village. Thirty six memberships sold is pretty solid response.

As for Pipefish, I think we're going to stay at Hypepotamus. The major reasons are:

• Access to Georgia Tech - We depend on access to the latest in AI and machine learning research to stay ahead. And that only happens at Georgia Tech. While it isn't there yet, the planned HPC building going in next door will be a huge asset:
  
• An e-commerce hub - What Heath and Kevin have done at Hypepotamus is create a small e-commerce oriented hub. There are potential customers, partners, and experts in important verticals. Looking at tweets about ATV it appears that many of the companies moving to Buckhead are in or near the marketing automation space.
• Waffle House - There's a Waffle House on 5th Street. ;-)
• Pickup games - One feature I like about Hypepotamus that I hope ATV figures out a way to support is having some space that's free. Some place where you can go and work with others to figure out what it is you want to do. Our community has the equivalents to full blown gyms, personal trainers, private clubs, etc. But we still need some where for “pickup games”.

These are Pipefish's reasons for staying in Midtown. Someone else's company will have different reasons and its good that there's choice. Pipefish could get to the point where Buckhead makes sense. Or Alpharetta which is where our parent company is based. Regardless of our reasons, I think what David has done with ATV is a Good Thing™ and I'll strongly encourage others to go there if it makes sense.

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Yesterday was my first full week of writing a blog article every day. There were a few days where I wasn't sure I could get to it. I was lucky that Space News had that Bigelow announcement. Here are some of my upcoming posts:

• Balance ball desk results
• My long awaited GDP to S&P 500 correlation paper
• An introduction to Pipefish
• My executive coaching plan
• My Getting Things Done plan
• Closing doors

Those are the big ones and they will take me a while to get to all of them. And yes, this post is a bit of a cop out since its not a useful topic. But it is a committment to getting some important posts done and doing the things behind them.

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Parabolic Arc is reporting on a SpaceNews.com article that Bigelow Aerospace and NASA are working toward an inflatable module attached to the International Space Station. Designated the Bigelow Expanded Activiy Module (BEAM), the fullsized module could be attached as early as 2015.

Credit: NASA

Parabolic Arc's Doug Messier says the deal starts with “$17.8 million for preliminary work on the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM). This would be an inflatable addition that would prove out technologies for future space facilities, including Bigelow’s own commercial space stations.”

The timeline reportedly from NASA is fairly aggressive which means that Bigelow has anticipated the deal and has much of the hardware already built. This jives with Bigelow's rehire that began after SpaceX's flight last year:

Start-up		2011
Small Structural inflatable on ISS		(2013) TBD
Large Inflatable mission module launched and attached to International Space Station		2015
ECLSS closed-loop system delivered post		2015
Mission Duration: end of ISS life		(2020)

Unless I'm missing something the only vehicle capable of deliverying a small structural inflatable to the ISS in 2013 is a Falcon 9. Does that mean that the COTS program can be used for deliverying not just cargo but major structural components?

I'm also sure that, while Bigelow will learn quite a bit from this contract, its also a significant marketing point for those foreign government looking for NASA's endorsement. If successful you could easily see the ISS replaced with a privately built system by its possible end of life in 2020.

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Back in December David Cummings posted an article on The Art of the Customer Discovery Interview where he discussed how difficult they are to do and how not to “lead the witness” or introduce your own biases. As mentioned in the comments to David's article, examples for how to avoid these pitfalls were left as an exercise for the reader.

Amazingly enough, at almost the same time Pipefish was going through this exact process, but with the help of a professional interviewer. The interview technique we used is called “Laddering”. The idea is “where a seemingly simple response to a question is pushed by the interviewer in order to find subconscious motives.” Stealing liberally from Wikipedia:

It begins with a simple question, and then another question is asked about that response. For example, an interviewer may ask: “How come you skipped class?” and the response may be: “I went out with my friends”. The next question would be something like “Why did you go out with your friends?”. Essentially, the format is as follows:

Interviewer: “Why x?”
Subject: “Because z”
Interviewer: “Why z?”
Subject: “Because b”
Interviewer: “Why b?”

The first responses are generally functional justifications, like “I went out with my friends because I wanted some pizza”, or “I wanted some pizza because I used to eat it as a child”; but eventually the interviewer hopes to reach a virtue justification like “It's good to be childish”. Then it is fair to conclude that the interviewee skipped class because he valued childishness.

Those familiar with Agile software development will see a similarity to the 5 Whys technique for problem solving. It isn't sufficient to simply get a “thumbs up/down” response from a potential customer. A startup needs to understand the reasons why as much as possible. This is especially true with B2C oriented business models.

One of the things our interview coach helped us with is understanding the “personality types” (not the best word, but it works) of the users we were interviewing. You can introduce a severe bias by only interviewing people who are readily accessible. If your offices are on 5th Street near Georgia Tech then “getting out of the building” means leaving midtown because that area of midtown self selects for particular personality types and demographics.

The lean startup methodology is about being as intentional as possible. When it comes to customer discovery that means being intentional about who you are interviewing and how. Here are some examples for using laddering in interviews:

• Laddering: A Research Interview Technique for Uncovering Core Values
• THE LADDERING TECHNIQUE - A way to conduct interviews (PDF)
• Laddering Interview Techniques
• DNA Discovery Process

Should you hire someone to help you like we did? Its hard to say since I'm sure the costs are going to vary wildly. Customer testing and discovery is going to be a very iterative process for us so we're going to have to develop the ability to do that in house. There is a book coming out that might help so when it does I'll post a review.

Does anyone else have suggestions for user/customer interview techniques?

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One of the many personnel changes within the Obama administration that happened in December was the appointment of Elisse Walter as the new chair chairman of the Securities and Commission. There was significant evidence that the previous chair, Mary Schapiro, has delayed the implementation of the Jobs Act. The Jobs act “is a law intended to encourage funding of United States small businesses by easing various securities regulations. It passed with bipartisan support, and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on April 5, 2012.” But even though several legally required deadlines have passed, the regulations still have not been published.

With the new appointment there is hope that the delays are over. If so then this should make funding New Space startups much easier. In 2012 we saw several examples of successful crowdfunding projects: Uwingu, ArduSat, LiftPort, and SkyCube. With crowdfunding's legal position more clear, especially as it relates to funding in exchange for equity, one would think there should be a small explosion of crowdfunded space projects in 2013.

But what about the failed ones? Projects such as Making Progress on Star Trek Physics, or the SHAAKE Mission. Why do some get funded while others don't? Most crowdfunding specialists will tell you that its about marketing and PR. But I'm not sure that's enough for space related projects.

My hypothesis is that most sources of money willing to fund a space related project aren't experts enough in the field to determine which projects are possible or which teams are capable of completing the projects. The successful cases above had several very prominent space community personalities advocating for them. The ones that failed didn't. One could simply assume that these personalities were simply providing free PR but I think that is to simplistic. Instead they are providing a free vetting service. Their stature and accomplishments provide evidence to others that their technical statements can be trusted.

If we as an industry want to encourage crowdfunding them we need to begin thinking about institutionalizing that vetting process. That does NOT mean someone acting as a gatekeeper for who gets endorsed and who doesn't. But something were those who have technical, management, and business expertise can crowdsource the vetting process more efficiently. That means not just technical tools for managing the process but actively recruiting people to participate.

Anyone willing to step up and help?

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As some of you know I am co-founder of Pipefish. Its kind of a social networking tool except that we're not connecting you with friends but with people who share your same taste in things. You'll probably never know some of them but together you'll be able to find stuff you care about.

As you can imagine we need user experience designers, mobile app and machine learning developers, Rails developers, etc. I need developers. One of the ones I had recently left Atlanta to take a job with a company in San Francisco called DeveloperAuction. Mike Mickiewicz, co-founder of 99designs and CEO of DeveloperAuction described the problem in a Forbes article:

Such is the sorry, frantic state of recruiting technical talent. “The demand for engineers far outstrips the supply,” says Matt Mickiewicz, the 29 year-old CEO of DeveloperAuction. “Good engineers are never unemployed and never seeking jobs.” The result is the Pete London experience: Any decent engineer gets hounded by packs of recruiters on a daily basis, meaning even tempting offers get lumped in with the spam.

What is striking is the salaries that developers are getting from the system. This is from Techcrunch:

During the first two-week long auction companies made $30 million worth of offers from companies like Quora and Dropbox. Our first story on the company garnered plenty of skepticism in the comments, but the most recent auction hit $78 million worth of bids according to co-founder Matt Mickiewicz.

The articles on this seem to suggest the idea is to help startups find developers. But the companies it lists as startups are Quora and Dropbox. Those are companies executing on a business model. They're not startups. DeveloperAuction seems to be focusing not on developers but on rock stars and unicorns. Working for a startup is an exercise in delayed gratification and risk. We don't pay market rates in salary. We offer stock options that some investors don't get.

Eventually DeveloperAuction will come to Atlanta. I can definitely see how DeveloperAuction will be good for developers, but is it going to drive up costs and expectations so much that it will exacerbate the problem for true startups? Thoughts?

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